chronicle.com — A researcher at Trinity College Dublin has software that lets users map the links between Wikipedia pages. His Web site is called ?Six Degrees of Wikipedia,? modeled after the trivia game ?Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.? Instead of the degrees being measured by presence in the same film, degrees are determined by articles that link to each other.
Jun 5, 2008 View in Crawl 4
bahamutoJun 6, 2008
I found it interesting it only take 3 clicks to get from Girl Friend to Geek:GirlfriendHuman sexuality Non-penetrative sex Geek
rwaldJun 6, 2008
A few years ago, a friend of mine challenged his cousin to find the shortest link between J.R.R. Tolkien and Optimus Prime. The cousin did the obvious thing: he edited Tolkien's entry to begin, "J.R.R. Tolkien, also known as Optimus Prime, was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor..."
stalefriesJun 7, 2008
No, the longest path will not be six clicks. I wrote a 17-page paper on the small world phenomenon. Ignoring the fact that there isn't any really good research on the topic (the original experiment had a horrible completion rate), research found that the *average* number of jumps was somewhere around 6.
stalefriesJun 7, 2008
There's a "your mom" joke in there somewhere.
fas2Jun 8, 2008
Thanks, you're totally right.
brentusJul 29, 2008
we play this all the time: " wikigame" but i feel pretty inadequate to find out that the average is 6 clicks. it usually takes me quite a few. but yeah, dates are by far the easiest, most fluid way to get from one article to another
brentusJul 29, 2008
i know right?
brentusJul 29, 2008
yeah i have never heard the Kevin Bacon example. but six degrees of separation i am familiar with. It is very interesting that the same constant applies to wikipedia.
brentusJul 29, 2008
same goes for digg lol. i don'e even kno how i ended up on this. i started by reading an article on ron paul...?